space

The C suites have nothing to lose. Best case, they make more money, worst case they get replaced and hired as a C suite by some other company.

Not only that. If you buy an app, you are at the mercy of its creator. If they decide they want to fill it with ads and tracking, or switch to a subscription model, there's nothing you can do. You can't rollback updates, you can't install an older version from the play store. If they decide to remove it from the store, you won't be able to install it any more.

I wouldn't recommend Optiplexes... HP, Dell, Lenovo pre-builts use proprietary parts making them a pain in the rear to work with. I recommend getting a PC made with standard parts.

Personally I prefer older PCs in standard formfactors. I avoid HP, Dell, Lenovo pre-builts because they use proprietary power supplies and motherboards, making them difficult to upgrade. Laptops aren't really upgradable, they don't have enough SATA ports, and USB isn't reliable enough for storage. Raspberry Pies, while power efficient, are too underpowered. Old server hardware is also an option, but they are generally too noisy.

I've been using Firefox as my main browser for a long time. Sites that don't work in FF are very rare. If it's something I really need to access, I just use chrome/edge for that particular site. But as I said, it happens rarely, and there's an easy way to work around it.

What I think the biggest problem with the traditional package managers is that (1) they don't isolate packages from each other (when you install a program files are placed in many random places, like /usr/bin, /usr/lib etc) and (2) you can't have multiple versions of the same package installed at the same time.

This creates a lot of work for package maintainers who need to constantly keep packages up to date as dependencies are updated.

Also, because of this, every distro is essentially an insane dependency tree where changing even one small core package could break everything.

Because of this, backwards compatibility on Linux is terrible. If you need to run an older application which depends on older packages, your only choice is to download an older distro.

This is what snap and flatpak try to solve. I think they are not great solutions, because they ended up being an extra package manager next to the traditional package managers. Until we see a distro that uses flatpak or something similar exclusively, the problem is not solved.

Because these are small shops that have limited availability outside North America, and are fairly expensive compared to Thinkpads which are widely used by corporations, and can be found pretty cheaply.